Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:07] Speaker B: The City, the BABA Podcast where we bring together top actors in the Smart City arena, sparking dialogues and interactions around the stakeholders and themes most prevalent for today's citizens and tomorrow's generations.
I am your host, Tamlyn Shimizu and I hope you will enjoy this episode and gain knowledge and connections to accelerate the change for a better urban life.
Smart in the City is brought to you by BABLE Smart Cities. We enable processes from research and strategy development to co creation and implementation. To learn more about us, please visit the BABLE platform@babel smartcities.eu.
welcome back everyone to another episode of Smart in the City. This episode will be hosted by one of my colleagues on the ground, so I hope you enjoy the change of voice and pace and I'll catch you next time.
[00:00:58] Speaker A: I'm your host today. My name is Alex. Today's episode is hosted here as part of Urban Future and recorded here live at the 2026 edition in Ljubljana.
I'm very happy to also introduce you to our guest of today, Peter Drakul, who is the City Center Commissioner and head of Futuraum for the city of Mannheim, Germany. Welcome, Peter.
[00:01:18] Speaker C: Thank you, Alex. Thank you for the invitation.
[00:01:21] Speaker A: Now we like to start our episode always with a little bit of a warm up with a kind of a teaser question for you today. The teaser question is explain to me the soul of the city of Mannheim.
[00:01:33] Speaker C: Yeah, the city of Mannheim is not a postcard city. It's not one of those beautiful cities. It's a working city, industrial city, is direct, very direct and honest. Sam is irritated in the beginning and it's very pragmatic. It's warm but rough and rough and warm. This are two good words who describe the soul of Manhattan.
[00:01:58] Speaker A: Brilliant.
You have an interesting title you have in your title it says Head of Futuraum. What does Head of Futuraum do?
[00:02:08] Speaker C: Futuram as a future space is a project for inner city development and I used to work for the former mayor on district development and the new mayor came and one of his main topics was the inner city development and so he asked me to work on the inner city development and we had a project called Futuram Future Space.
And yeah, I'm working on it for more than two and a half years now. For now.
[00:02:38] Speaker A: Interesting.
We have many listeners that are thinking about, you know, careers in our public sector as well. So do you want to maybe share with us a little bit of your background and what led you to your role today?
[00:02:50] Speaker C: I have maybe unusual career. When I was a boy, I made an Apprenticeship as a bricklayer. I worked on construction.
After that I went on evening courses, studied law, had.
I have a degree in law, was in a law firm, went to a ministry, Ministry of Integration. After State Barn Wittenberg. And after that I was a city councilor. And the mayor asked me to work for him as a chief of staff.
That's what I did till 2023.
And now I'm working on inner city development in the city of Mannheim. So work for the public and work for the municipality is great. It's wide, has every possibility. And you're doing good things the whole day.
[00:03:43] Speaker A: Brilliant.
[00:03:43] Speaker C: You're trying to do it.
[00:03:46] Speaker A: And we'll see lots of the great examples of what you have achieved and learned on the way throughout this. This episode. It's a very interesting background as well.
Love to hear that. A lot of experience in different fields. Before we go into these methods and processes that we want to talk about, let us zoom out maybe for a second. If we look at the changing city center of Mannheim right now, what does change and why does it feel so urgent right now?
[00:04:17] Speaker C: I must first start. The city of Mannheim is in the southwest of of Germany and we are the center of the region R with 2.5 million people, 25,000 people are living in the city center. And they all like to come for shopping and for lunch and for dinner. And that's what people do in inner city. But retail is changing. We have a high pressure, not only since Corona, but before that already before that. And we have.
Everything is changing, like everywhere. We have a climate change.
The city is heavily sealed.
If you go in the downtown area, where the shops are, 96% is sealed. And so, for example, in the hot summer, we got really hot nights with, for example, around midnight, with 30 degrees. If we go in the outskirts of Mannheim, it's 22 degrees. Oh, wow.
[00:05:17] Speaker A: Eight degree difference.
[00:05:18] Speaker C: Eight degree difference. Yeah.
And it's really a high pressure to transform.
And so we have a great pressure. But question is always who moves? Because we know if someone moves, he can lose.
[00:05:34] Speaker A: Yeah, and that's. That's the interesting part. Right. So city centers are very layered places. Every square meter means different things to different people.
And maybe now let's go into these, into your practical experiences with that. In a place with so many different users and interests, where do you begin to communicate and to talk about change?
[00:05:59] Speaker C: If you know there's need for change?
It's really important to involve the locals from the beginning. And the locals are businesses, are neighborhood associations, are people living there, are the stakeholders who are there and who are working there. And what we did was to separate. We made classical citizen participation and us, for example, the residents.
But what was really hard to handle, to work with the stakeholders, because we had a mobility trial which went bad.
We had a lot of dissonance and a polarized city.
And so the first step was to collect all the stakeholders, which you need to bring them on one table and let them work together.
[00:06:52] Speaker A: What type of stakeholders are we talking about there? So on the one hand you have the citizens, the people living there visiting, but what was this other stakeholder group who was part of that?
[00:07:01] Speaker C: We had more than 30 stakeholders working for two years in the.
In the project. We made a working group called City Factory.
We had neighborhood associations, we had migration associations, we had. But also the businesses, local businesses, the chamber of commerce.
We have a property owner network, which was also developed during Futuram, and architects, landscape architects, et cetera.
And yeah, more than 30. And they came all on one table to work on inner city development.
[00:07:42] Speaker A: Very interesting, very interesting. Can you recall a few interesting moments with these stakeholder groups where you say there is like, you know, there was a big learning from one another, or, you know, you met, you. You put them together in rooms. Right. And you had discussions jointly with these big groups. They had these discussions. Discussions can go any direction. Right. So what happened there?
[00:08:01] Speaker C: Yeah, I must confess that I wasn't sure if it will work because there were a few stakeholders when they saw each other in the street, they changed the street side and they were talking about letters to the editor, about each other. So it wasn't really a high tension between them.
But what we did, we didn't start with measures to ask them what to change.
We asked them how could the city looks like in five years.
So let's start work on a shared vision on the common goal.
And this was really hard that they are there first they sat together and what was good, they listened to each other.
Yeah, they listened to each other. And so they saw the perspective of the other person.
And this started to create a kind of empathy. And you need empathy to create a deep understanding.
And you know, democracy is really hard. And that's what they also learned, was the learning of the stakeholders. They were exhausted after the process. They said, please don't make that once again. But that's what's democracy with our policymakers, city councillors, mayors, what they have all the time. Yeah.
And yeah, so we started with a shared vision of the inner city, not what to do.
We painted together a big picture.
[00:09:31] Speaker A: It is Actually interesting. Very often in these processes also, if experts are involved very early, we talk too quickly about solutions without having a joint understanding of the situation and the joint picture for the future. How does that picture for Mannheim now look like? If you would describe it in just a few sentences. What common understanding did you come up with?
[00:09:52] Speaker C: First, the picture is not so important.
Important is that the stakeholders could commit on one goal. This is the point.
But for example, we had a few visions, like, for example, we wanted people like to have an easy way as pedestrians, a good way to walk.
Yeah. And that means, in fact, that drivers with cars or with bicycle, that they have to keep an eye on the pedestrians and the vulnerable people, elder poor people, or for example, families with kids, that they had to keep an eye on them. Or another example, we want to use better roofs because the city is high very densely and we need more space. And so we need to use to take more effort of the roofs. And now we have a project called multi roofs to better use the roofs. So we painted together a picture, which we can do practically, but this also abstract, that give us a sign how to develop in a city.
And the most important thing is that it shows a way to connect to each other and to develop together public space.
[00:11:18] Speaker A: And what were these kind of agreements? So what did they agree on? A social, inclusive city, on a more walkable. So what were kind of the things that everyone would sign off then?
[00:11:28] Speaker C: Yeah, we had, for example, mobility. We talked about mobility. We have a street where we have a problem with car drivers in general, male drivers who are driving in circles, listening to loud music and have a good time in the city by car.
And so we develop strategies how to create empathy for the residents and how to create a new public space so that it's not so interesting, that becomes less attractive to the drivers to drive through.
We have shadow and greening, for example.
The businesses also say we need more green and we need more shadow. And it created action.
When we had some planters which were used in the past, and local businesses asked, for example, for the planters, they didn't want to wait till we go to the city council council and go into planning. And after two years, maybe we start with action. They asked for the planters and they took responsibility. It were their planters, were their flowers and plants. And we had more than 120 businesses who said, okay, we are maintaining now the planters and we are responsible. And this was an action which was created in the city factory and where we had a commitment that everyone, not only the Neighborhoods, not only the residents, but also the businesses have to bring them part for a better inner city.
[00:13:11] Speaker A: And it's cool to see that they did in fact agree on such important points during this process. You said it was a two year
[00:13:18] Speaker C: process, is that correct? Yeah, we had two proposals which you wrote for the city council.
And what's also maybe very important, we discussed on the together the issues and the measures.
And if someone was strong against it, we didn't take it.
So we had a high commitment of 100%. So when we went to the city council in the draft, in the proposal for the city council, it was 100% city factory, 100% from neighborhood associations to, to the businesses. And that was a huge success.
[00:14:02] Speaker A: Brilliant. So, because one of my questions now would be if I play devil's advocate, it's a long period of time that you spend engaging businesses, stakeholders, also the citizens. Some might argue that this costs a lot of money. And what's your answer to that? Is it worth it? Is it kind of. Would you do it the way.
[00:14:22] Speaker C: Again, Alex, this is a good point. Transformation needs time.
And we had the project Futuram because we had in the years 2022, 2023, a mobility trial and we had interventions in public space, we had rerouting of streets. And the city was highly polarized after it. So it was literally everyone against everyone.
Businesses, neighborhood cessation, politics, really everyone against everyone. We had bad news. We had more than 300 newspaper articles, letters to the editor and, and this is much more expensive than if you start with a good process, involve the locals from the beginning, work on activation. And this is much discuss less time and less money than if you start with a project and try to convince the people during the impact, during the implementation of the project. So you're right, it costs, it needs time, but it's about sustainability.
[00:15:30] Speaker A: Oh no, that's, that's good. And maybe that's particularly in those projects where there's a lot of stakeholders involved. Right. City centers, maybe other types of projects wouldn't be that much engagement. But I think you made a super strong case there and you had the two examples right, very close to each other, very nice. But you didn't just manage to, to engage the stakeholders. They were actively kind of promoting and owning parts of the, of the project. So as you said, you know, they took care of the planting and the greening of the area themselves without even money or other support from, from the city council. That is super cool. Do you have some kind of insights into that, how that can Be replicated. How do you make a simple engagement process to an actual process where, you know, supporters, active supporters come out?
[00:16:23] Speaker C: Yeah, I wouldn't say active supporters, I would say owners of the process.
So let them. Let them give them the possibility to develop their ideas. And if they develop their ideas, they will take responsibility and they will pay also for it. And this is very important because we got in Germany currently a crisis of the communal budgets.
And for example, we are working on them on a horizontal greening in public space.
Four property owners came to us and asked us to support them to make a greening between two buildings.
We don't have the budget, but we could help by finding funds from the state.
And 75% is paid by the state and 25% by the locals. And yeah, if they pay 1 Euro, they will get 3 Euro back. And so it's a collaboration between us and the state and the property owner. So you always have to see what's the common goal and how can we help that the.
That the stakeholders have a benefit, a direct benefit to them. And I think this is the key ownership and activation.
[00:17:46] Speaker A: And you mentioned a super interesting thing, because municipal budgets become tighter. Right. So every year we see that all across, all across Europe. Do you actually think that these types of other forms of collaboration where you enable more than you pay or do, is this something that's kind of coming more now that is also kind of a solution to. To that budget crisis, or.
Too early to say no.
[00:18:12] Speaker C: I think this is a way out of the. Not a way out of the crisis, but to handle the crisis. Yeah, that's what you said, Alex, is in fact how I'm working. I don't ask for.
From. From budget, from the municipality, because I know we don't have anything. So it's to look for fundings, to look for stakeholders who have a budget and to convince them that we can build together and sharpen a better inner city. Because, you know, we have the pressure to transform. So it's obvious, it's obvious we don't need to discuss it. So we have to go the way,
[00:18:49] Speaker A: as you said, it doesn't make sense to then dwindle on the problem that there is no budget and not do anything, but we find other ways. I like that, I like that.
That's a very active approach to that. And you also mentioned already in some of your projects and some of your processes, things go wrong and then you stand up and try again. But maybe you want to share an example in one of the existing projects or one of Those that you haven't mentioned, where you maybe missed the stakeholder in the engagement process or where you didn't talk to the right people at the right time and where that created problems in, in the later stage, there's always these, these are the things I think we're also our listeners learn the most from.
[00:19:29] Speaker C: I can tell you about my experience with missing stakeholders. The one is the young ones and we had a digital questionnaire and around 4,000 people have.
Have give us the questionnaire back.
But the part of the young ones was very low.
[00:19:53] Speaker A: Young ones, we are talking like teenagers.
[00:19:55] Speaker C: Teenagers, yeah. 18, 19, 20, 14, 15, 16, 17. Like that. And so we had a container in the public space and me and my team, we went directly, we saw young ones, young people and asked them.
But the elder are more motivated. And so you get a picture of the city which is painted by other people.
Interesting. And so we have seen that we, we failed at that point.
But what we did in the next step was to.
To go in school in downtown, ask the principal and I had three young members of my team, three women, and they went there and made a workshop with the teenagers from the 5th till the 11th class. And so it was fantastic, great results.
The second one were women in the first, in the first phase we had a lot of male stakeholders and retail is male driven. And on the other hand, 70% of the daily users are bought by women.
And so there's a dissonance and I realized it. And for our second term we made a working group only for women, business women and facilitated by women. But I can give you further examples. Migrations, immigrants, refugees, etc. Vulnerable groups who are not able to, we can't reach them, that they are getting part being part of the city factory.
But we're working on it. You need empowerment and you need trust and both is not easy to reach.
[00:21:50] Speaker A: And that's super interesting. And this all additional effort that you're putting in to make this a bit better. Is this like part of your personal motivation? This is part of your mandate?
I mean this is great, don't get me wrong. But all of this is in tight public budgets and tight timelines and stuff. It's all additional effort. So it's great you're doing it. But why? What's motivating you and where is this coming from?
[00:22:17] Speaker C: The city is fragmented. There are so many different worlds. And I think it's a task to the city administration, to the municipality to make a connection and not to union all stakeholders. But we have to take a look at those who maybe are not able to engage.
And this is a task for the public administration. And I know change can only come within, from within.
And if the people are not part of it, you will develop the inner city without them.
And my experience is that you will fail.
And so it's obvious you need those people to be part of it.
And that's more than urban development.
That's connecting the people and empower the people and being on the streets, it's grassroots. So we're doing both strategy and grassroots.
And I think this is unusual in the city administration, but I love it. I love my job.
[00:23:32] Speaker A: Well, that is. That's great energy right there.
You do a lot. Right. So in making the processes correct, in getting the people on board very early. But does it happen to you in your projects as well that the first time, you know, ground is broken, something is really changing in the city? Then there is still a few people that kind of didn't hear or didn't want to hear or didn't join these engagement early enough. And then they start, you know, kind of yelling against it. So where tensions then really get high. You know, we sometimes see these things when the first parking space gets reused for something. Do you see that in your. In your work as well, that particularly when you break ground, there's another wave of convincing to do?
[00:24:14] Speaker C: Yeah, no, I know when I'm breaking ground, I need to talk to the people who are, who are there in front of there. I need to involve them.
And that means I make one date announcement, say, okay, we will redesign the beginning of the street, the start of the street. We will unsealing it and greening it. And in the first time to come, and then I make a second, a third, a fourth time till I have everyone on board.
Because I know that usually the people don't react.
It's when you start to broke the concrete and the asphalt, then they say, why didn't tell me someone what happened? Why didn't ask me?
The city administration, what I keep on my mind. And it's always the same. So I go there as often as it's possible. And yes, this is not economic. Yeah. But at the end they are all with us. And that's the most important thing.
[00:25:21] Speaker A: And are these the kind of projects whenever there is concrete being broken and when there's something being green, is this the projects where you then see the big resistance? Do you have other examples?
[00:25:31] Speaker C: I think there is resistance in another way.
It's not about breaking concrete or some plants or trees. It's about democracy. It's the question about who.
Who owns the city or who is deciding. And what we made in our process is to open the door.
And it means that in that moment, not only two or three or four persons are sitting with the mayor, maybe 15 persons, 15 stakeholders. And that changed the power.
And so it's also a question of democracy.
And where the question is about democracy, there's also huge conflicts.
[00:26:19] Speaker A: Well, and as long as you're open to them and discussing them, you see that the outcome is there. Let's talk about the outcome a little bit. What are you hoping for as next steps in the Futuram project or in general for the city center of Mannheim? What do you hope to happen next?
[00:26:39] Speaker C: Well, we have some greening action. I want to make some facade greenings, and we are creating shadow and greens and places where the sun is burning in summer.
And one important thing is we've got a market square. The market square is the central place. And the next step is to develop this market square. And we have in the last 20 years, the development that we have now. Meantime, only Turkish restaurants there.
And so it's a very, very. It's.
It's not very diverse. And that's. Everyone is critic is criticizing this also the Turkish businesses there.
And so if we don't want to change the restaurants and the shops, we must change this market square and bring maybe a brewery or a winery there and have different possibilities for eating and drinking, for one example.
And this is really a huge mission.
And before we start with it, we have to first empower the local businesses, the Turkish businesses, so that they can go with the change.
Yeah, so it's important to. Yeah, to bring them together, to let them work together and then we can develop and can change the atmosphere and the offers and everything.
So this is my approach.
If I know I want to change the public space, I need to connect and I need to empower the locals and to take them with my journey of development.
[00:28:31] Speaker A: Well, that's brilliant and that is. Has such a huge impact on the people that are living there, that are experiencing the city. So I'm impressed and hope that all works out and well, we might not be able to grant you all your wishes, but let's at least listen to them now because if you could think about wishing something to support you in moving these things forward faster, what would you wish for? What would kind of be P's wish for?
For a better future?
[00:29:03] Speaker C: Yeah, it's about commitment and ownership and the people, the stakeholders, the residents, they must take care of the public space.
And you take care if it's yours. Yeah.
So ownership is the most important thing. Then activate them.
Because no city council, I don't know, no city administration can make it on its own. So we need people, and that's the reason we need collaboration. We need collaboration between people and stakeholders who usually don't work together.
And then we can have success. I'm convinced.
[00:29:44] Speaker A: Well noted down that wish and I hope all the people of Mannheim, all the stakeholders that are listening and you get this because it sounds like a great road you're on and I wish you all the best for this one. Before we go to the next part of this, is there anything that we didn't touch about your work, about the activities that you still want to share with our audience that we kind of missed, or I missed in asking to.
[00:30:10] Speaker C: No, no, no. I want to make. Want to maybe make some advertisement for the urban future.
For example, I was the first time in Rotterdam in 2024 and I had developers with me, property owners, pastors, a really great and diverse group which came from Mannheim to the Urban Future. And Urban Future was a great inspiration for them, for my colleagues who went with me to the conference. And that's very important, to share common wishes, to see what's possible in other countries, in other cities, and to see that yes, there are obstacles, but if we work together, we can handle it. And that's really fantastic.
[00:31:06] Speaker A: It's a great energy here as well, again. Right.
[00:31:08] Speaker C: So.
[00:31:09] Speaker A: And Liu villana here at UrbanFuture 2026. We both joined quite some sessions already and I hope we have time for quite some more. That's the energy that we are looking towards. Thanks a lot for that part. As you know, we have a couple of segments left.
I want to thank my college for putting that one in now, because the one that they've chosen for us here is. Flip the script.
[00:31:34] Speaker B: Flip the script.
You are the one asking the questions and I'll be the one answering them.
[00:31:44] Speaker C: Where's your favorite city? You have seen a lot of cities which are progressive and fast forward.
What is your favorite city from the professional point of view?
[00:31:57] Speaker A: Oh, wow. That is a. That is a tough one. It's one that we are discussing often over dinner, right? Over, over. Over drinks. We have had that yesterday again, there is the beauty really about my job is that I get to see a lot, a lot of city. And I don't think you can. You can build a city that is perfect, but each one has its own charm. Right? I love Ljubljana. Right? So told Yesterday where the vice mayor. City of love. Super, super safe here you can walk outside 24 7. I love that city.
I live in Stuttgart. Right. Has its, has its rough edges the same way as, as Mannheim. But you know, my daughter is born there. So I have a very much emotional connection to Stuttgart. Now I cannot say a list of cities that I love without naming London.
It's where I studied for a while. It's the whole world built into one underground system.
So that does something for me.
So. And now I do a lot of injustice to a lot of other cities that I've visited.
But there is, I think there are a few places and we ask from the professional lens that do a very good job in moving areas, moving the city forward. I think Copenhagen is one to mention that. I think that what they are doing, Vienna, what they are doing with their subsidiaries and their companies and global cities, Bangkok I love.
So I'm sorry, I should have answered in one straight way. But the question I'm asking myself, that's an open question.
[00:33:32] Speaker C: There are always a little bit complicated gym. So great. Okay. And where's your next city?
[00:33:40] Speaker A: The next one I'm going to is going to be Venice in a. In a week's time. Supporting them to.
To choose some good mobility solutions for the, for the outskirts of. Of the city. Looking forward to that one as well. Okay, so brilliant. That was, that was fun. Thanks. Thanks for the question too.
Hope to continue the discussion here in Urban Future for quite some time. There is one last recurring question that we ask each and every one of our guests and that is for you, what is a Smart City?
[00:34:13] Speaker C: A Smart City is a city which helps the people to live in a highly dense populated area, to have a good time, to know how it is outside, how to get mobility, how the weather is and, and where to find what you need, and all in a very uncomplicated way of technique. And that's a Smart City, which helps the people to have a good time in the city.
[00:34:48] Speaker A: And I think Manheim is on a very good pathway there.
[00:34:52] Speaker C: Yeah, we are on the way.
[00:34:52] Speaker A: Yes, that's good to hear. Peter, thank you so much for joining us here at the podcast and at Urban Future. I really enjoyed this conversation and I think it's such an important one for cities right now. Finding the right balance between engagement and speed. And thanks again also to Urban Future for the partnership and hosting us here in Ljubljana again for all of our listeners. Don't forget, you can always create a free account on barbermindsmartcities.eu find out more about our projects, solutions and implementations for free. Thank you all very much. Greetings from Lubigliana.
[00:35:27] Speaker B: Thank you all for listening. I'll see you at the next stop on the journey to a better urban life.
